While others were still contemplating
entering the e-publishing market, CEO
Michael Kim took the plunge by setting
up i-ePUB in November 2010. As the
industry first mover, the company got to
produce many of Korea’s first e-publica-tions for domestic clients such as KDB
Daewoo Securities, Korean Broadcasting
System and Toyota Korea. Barely one
year after its inception, i-ePUB became
an OverDrive partner and provided
Korean e-books to 15,000 libraries and
schools around the world. It is also the
partner of choice for Publish on Demand
Global and Kobo.

duced so far, and BookJam controls at
least half of the book apps market in
Korea.

BookJam also produces boxed appsbased on an author’s collection of works,as well as store apps with payment facil-ities. Manga collections and Frenchauthor Bernard Werber’s sci-fi titles(including his bestselling Le Papillon desetoiles) are among its popular boxed apps.“Our strength is in graphic novels andcomics as we can offer highly sophisti-cated graphic layouts, better readabilityand faster production turnaround withBXP,” adds Cho, creator of the proprie-tary format. “User experience takes pri-ority in our R&D efforts. Korean readersare spoiled as they are used to beautifullydesigned books printed on high-qualitypaper. Now they want the same aesthet-ics and experience replicated digitally,and that is the main reason behind thecreation and development of BXP.”Cho and his team also offer publishersa content platform to showcase and selltheir book apps. “To focus on their corecompetencies, publishers have alwaysrelied on retailers and aggregators topush their titles. But this means they donot have any statistics on the sales or end-consumers. They would not have thenecessary information to improve theirproduct discoverability or plan newproducts. With BookJam’s e-store andanalytics, we can help publishers plantheir marketing strategy or productdevelopment,” adds content producerHyunkyung Kim. “For instance, basedon such consumer analytics, we decidedto offer our boxed manga apps in differ-ent volumes and at different prices. It isabout knowing the market, how muchconsumers are willing to pay and how weshould offer the product.”With a new cloud-based content plat-form nearing completion, the team hasalready started working on children’se-books for it, including prenatal caretitles. Much attention is also given toexpanding its market. So far, its mangacollections have been successfullylaunched in Japan and China. The con-tent platform is also being integratedinto a Japanese publishing company’sinfrastructure. “We have a great productin BXP, and we are finding new areaswhere it can be used to provide high-quality content,” says Cho, attributingthe company’s success to his team of tal-ented engineers and developers, who lovebooks and have a great relationship withtheir publishing clients. Michael Kim, CEO of i-ePUB

ProjectShowcase Among BookJam’s many complex manga projects was theNaruto collection, the Korean AppStore’s top-grossing comicapp in December 2013. For this, the team’s top priority wasimage resolution. “Most people expect e-books to have lowerimage quality than the print edition. But we think differently.

There are many considerations that need to be looked at when
turning a manga title into an e-book, such as the display ratio,
landscape or portrait mode, image capacity and UI/UX design.

Japanese manga fans are very particular about image quality.
So we make every effort to ensure fast-loading, high-definition
images for different screen displays,” says CEO Hanyeol Cho.

For Open Books, the Korean publisher of sci-fi author Bernard
Werber, the team provides more than a white-label e-bookstore. “The publisher wanted to sell some older
Werber titles at a special discount and at the same time gauge his fans’ interest and knowledge of his
titles. To make it fun, we created a hidden store within the app. To get to the hidden store to enjoy the $100
discount, visitors had to solve a series of quizzes on Belokan, the imaginary city in Werber’s Ants trilogy. It
generated a great deal of interest among fans and general readers, and it made us realize the vast potential
in ‘hidden’ or embedded marketing,” adds Cho.